avahi-indicator is an AppIndicator that shows services advertised on the network with Zeroconf/Bonjour/Avahi, written in Python. Network services show up in the Ubuntu menu bar, and you can choose a service from a dropdown menu. This will open the corresponding service (e.g., opens a web browser, a SSH shell, a SFTP connection, etc.)

As long as an AppImage does not exist yet, the simplest way on Ubuntu is

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install avahi-daemon python2.7 python-avahi python-dbus
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/probonopd/avahi-indicator/master/avahi-indicator.py
python avahi-indicator.py

Pull requests welcome!

• Solve org.freedesktop.Avahi.TimeoutError
• Sort list of service names in the menu, and sort list of services in the menu
• If a service is announced on the network after avahi-indicator is already launched, then a popup notification should appear, informing about the new service. However apparently avahi-indicator does not get informed (yet) when new services appear on the network after avahi-indicator has been launched (FIXME)
• If a menu item is selected, then we should check if the service is still responding and if it is not, remove the corresponding menu entry or trigger a complete discovery (the device might have been powered off and no longer available)
• Handle devices going away (are they "de-published")?
• Support actions on more services (currently the menu shows only service types for which an action is configured (e.g., http(s), ssh, sftp-ssh, smb)
• Test on other GNOME systems than Ubuntu
• Sort menu (by service type and name)
• Remove services from the menu that are no longer there
• Support multiple domains
• Create AppImage